Buzz Off!

From Nik Goodman:

I’ve just visited client station KRONEHIT based in Vienna, who are just celebrating audience figures (from their measurement system in Austria called ‘Radio Test’) that put them well over the ½ Million listeners mark. Well done to all the hardworking team there. One of the fun initiatives that I heard about while I was there, is a fantastic idea that I had to share with you.

In summer, as we know, there are a lot of insects about... especially mosquitoes, which if you are near any water, can be particularly bad. So KRONEHIT are offering listeners a 'Mosquito Free Summer'! How? Well... with a little bit of technical trickery!

They are embedding a silent tone of 14,850 Hertz in the signal, which imitates the buzzing of female mosquitoes. Therefore other female mosquitoes who hear this tone, are apparently repelled by the sound, and don’t come near it! Brilliant!

Therefore, the message is simple. If you’re outdoors, get KRONEHIT playing on the radio and you’ll enjoy your first summer without mosquitoes!! Genius!

Now, there’s a lot of debate as to whether high frequencies actually repel mosquitoes or not.... but that’s not the point. The initiative is quirky enough for people to try and it and stands out as something really interesting when you hear it.

When I was told about this, I didn’t know if it was some sort of whacky radio stunt or not... but they are actually doing it for real, with a real frequency generator on the transmission chain. And I’m sure they’ll be lots of listeners who say how brilliantly it works too.

How to build a radio in a POW camp

By Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing:

This first-hand account of the construction of a clandestine shortwave radio by British POWs in a Japanese camp in Singapore really reminds me of James Clavell's magnificent novel King Rat, my all-time favorite war-novel, which revolves grippingly around the construction, discovery and consequences of a hidden shortwave in the Changi camp (both Clavell and Ronald "St Trinian's" Searle were interned in this camp).

BJ: Can I just ask you - the components for the low voltage battery cells that you produced, where did you get all the components from?

RGW: Well, zinc wasn't hard, there was some sheet zinc lying on the aerodrome and we pinched quite a bit of that because that would be eaten away during the use of the cells for the low voltage. I don't know what would have happened if that ran out. I think someone produced two lantern cells which did for a while, but it was mainly on this home-made cell system, which wasn't efficient but nowhere near as inefficient as the rectifier was. We must have been consuming... Ah Ping said he had to turn up a lot of power to keep the lights what they wanted. We were dispersing such an amount of power in this four test tube rectifier for the high tension.

A variable capacitor was another component we had to bring in. We couldn't make a variable capacitor, it was impossible. We had to take two plates off the one we had to get a high enough frequency. Yes, I can't remember why we didn't go up a bit in inductance; it was largely a trial and error business really. Except that in a regenerative receiver you had some idea when you were near a station because the receiver was so sensitive as all regenerative receivers are.

It had a piece of meat skewer type wood which I had a hole drilled in by a pen-knife, and we glued this in with some of our glue or something, into the capacitor shaft so that we could tune it by holding a little stick across it, fixing it at about six inches because one couldn't get one's hands any closer to the set because it was in a state of very near oscillation where the maximum sensitivity is, just before it bursts into oscillation. With a fairly clear HF band, it wasn't long before we knew roughly, by putting a couple of marks on the stick, where it was. We knew that the Voice of America was due for a transmission and I don't think we ever knew the frequencies because the BBC didn't announce frequencies, they just came on the air and broadcast.

Construction of Radio Equipment in a Japanese POW Camp (via Make).

New radio chip mimics human ear

From Science Daily:

MIT engineers have built a fast, ultra-broadband, low-power radio chip, modeled on the human inner ear, that could enable wireless devices capable of receiving cell phone, Internet, radio and television signals.

Rahul Sarpeshkar, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and his graduate student, Soumyajit Mandal, designed the chip to mimic the inner ear, or cochlea. The chip is faster than any human-designed radio-frequency spectrum analyzer and also operates at much lower power.

"The cochlea quickly gets the big picture of what's going on in the sound spectrum," said Sarpeshkar. "The more I started to look at the ear, the more I realized it's like a super radio with 3,500 parallel channels."

Sarpeshkar and his students describe their new chip, which they have dubbed the "radio frequency (RF) cochlea," in a paper to be published in the June issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. They have also filed for a patent to incorporate the RF cochlea in a universal or software radio architecture that is designed to efficiently process a broad spectrum of signals including cellular phone, wireless Internet, FM, and other signals.

The RF cochlea mimics the structure and function of the biological cochlea, which uses fluid mechanics, piezoelectrics and neural signal processing to convert sound waves into electrical signals that are sent to the brain.

As sound waves enter the cochlea, they create mechanical waves in the cochlear membrane and the fluid of the inner ear, activating hair cells (cells that cause electrical signals to be sent to the brain). The cochlea can perceive a 100-fold range of frequencies -- in humans, from 100 to 10,000 Hz. Sarpeshkar used the same design principles in the RF cochlea to create a device that can perceive signals at million-fold higher frequencies, which includes radio signals for most commercial wireless applications.

The device demonstrates what can happen when researchers take inspiration from fields outside their own, says Sarpeshkar.

"Somebody who works in radio would never think of this, and somebody who works in hearing would never think of it, but when you put the two together, each one provides insight into the other," he says. For example, in addition to its use for radio applications, the work provides an analysis of why cochlear spectrum analysis is faster than any known spectrum-analysis algorithm. Thus, it sheds light on the mechanism of hearing as well.

Read more here.

The Radio Conference 2009: A Transnational Forum

Location: York University, Toronto, Canada,
Dates: July 27-30th, 2009

This conference – the fifth transnational forum – aims to continue the
work of Sussex 2001, Madison, Wisconsin 2003 Melbourne 2005 and
Lincoln 2007 to bring together scholars, practitioners, and students
of radio to share ideas and perspectives on radio's cultural role in
an increasingly global media context. We welcome proposals and abstracts for papers, panels, and symposia on all aspects of radio – historical, cultural, critical, and
institutional – including investigations of the changing form and content of radio and its associated audio media. Preference will be given to papers and panels which report on current empirical research, introduce innovations in learning and teaching strategies, or engagement with key areas of theory or debate in radio studies. You may submit proposals for individual papers, pre-constituted panels, or symposia. Papers should be in English primarily. Should there be sufficient interest, French and/or bilingual panels may be formed. See our website at http://theradioconference2009.apps01.yorku.ca/ for information and instructions on how to submit your proposal.

Submission deadlines

Abstracts deadline is Friday 30th January 2009 and decisions will
be20communicated before Tuesday 30 March 2009. If you have a
particular need for an earlier decision please explain why in your
submission. Please send a 250 to 300 word abstract, brief author's
biography and contact information to Anne MacLennan at
radio09@yorku. ca (radio zero nine at yorku.ca). The conference is jointly sponsored by the York University, Toronto and the Radio Studies Network. The proposals will be peer reviewed by a panel of international scholars including:

Gail Philips, Murdoch University, Australia
Per Jauert, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Ken Garner, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
David Hendy, University of Westminster, UK
Paul Moore, University of Ulster, UK
Michael Keith, Boston College, USA
Peter Lewis, London Metropolitan University, UK
Anne Dunn, University of Sydney, Australia
David Goodman, University of Melbourne, Australia
Hugh Chignell, Bournemouth University, UK
Eric Rothenbuhler, Texas A&M University, USA
Kate Lacey, University of Sussex, UK
Russell Johnston, Brock University, Canada
Jeff Webb, Memorial University, Canada
Len Kuffert, University of Manitoba, Canada

Organizing Committe
Anne MacLennan (York University, Canada; Joint chair)
Tim Wall (Birmingham City University, UK; Joint chair)
Michele Hilmes (University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA)
John Tebbutt (Latrobe University, Melbourne, Australia)

Please contact radio09@yorku.ca to submit abstracts and for further
information.

Yip Yip aliens discover a radio

From Sesame Street: